(Business people) speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; executives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights. We should tolerate them - every person of spirit wants to ride a white horse. -William Strunk Jr. (The Elements of Style)
The fast-paced unpredictable high-energy part refers to HR hiring and layoff practices.
I thought it was unpaid overtime and abusive management.
Even low cube walls would be great compared to all the “open floorplans” I’ve been in the last few years.
It’s not like everyone is having virtual meetings all day in an open floor plan office with terrible reverb on their day pass desks…right?
Nah bro we’ll fix it software. Like virtual backgrounds but for sound bro!
Panopticon
Unpredictable: “Our requirements are constantly changing due to bad planning.”
High energy: “There will be a lot of yelling.”
Fast-paced: “Your deadlines will always be due last week/month/year”.
The last place I worked, my role, by necessity, had to be the last step before any submission deadline. We received all of these deadlines months in advance.
Without fucking fail, the engineers on the team would wait until 0-6 work days before the deadline before sending me any markups with which to even start my work. Typically, these markups would contain anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks of work on my part.
Invariably, when I took this chronological conundrum to the project managers, their reply was some variation of, “I understand the difficulty but this deadline is set in stone. If you need to work overtime to get it done, I’m okay with that.”
For my first year and a half, I would then proceed to work insane hours to get as much done as I possibly could.
Finally on one project, this got so bad that the engineers sent me markups literally the night before the shit was due. In the meeting the next day where we were supposed to review the submission (but for which I was preparing to explain to them why we wouldn’t have any submission), instead, the project lead opens with, “Hey all, some of you have communicated to me that you’re pressed for time on this, so we’re going to push this deadline out by six weeks.”
After that I never worked one more minute of overtime to meet a deadline for them.
At least it’s a private cubicle and not an open layout where devs are crammed in cheek-to-jowl in a cacophony of chaos.
It’s not even the noise that’s the worst part. It’s that you know you can’t scratch your ass without everyone noticing.
Ass-scratcher!!
When you’ve got an itch, you’ve got an itch.
True. I’m only kidding.
Translation, “we want someone who’s ok with us harassing them to do stuff outside work hours”
“No.”
“You were hired here on the basis of being a team player.”
“And I put in exactly the hours required of me by the job description. You’re the manager; if slack needs to be picked up, it’s your responsibility to do so, not mine.”
My bosses all hate me, and I’m happier than ever.
Damn they gave you two monitors? The break room must have a pinball machine.
Yeah but they’re both 1080 Acers
Meh, for basic tasking it’s better than a single one
Tbh, two monitors don’t help me at all. I set up a cool home office during covid with all upgrades I could think of. Hardly ever used the second monitor. I even had difficulties filling my laptop screen with meaningful additional content. Also, neck pain of constantly working with a turned head is real.
The most important upgrade IMHO is a good chair, followed by a USB-C docking station and maybe a robotic arm for the display to adjust height and free some space on the desk
Depends heavily on what exactly you’re doing.
The chair, absolutely. But I’ll take the second monitor over a docking station any day (what are you even using it for? Connecting a laptop?).
2 monitors, full size keyboard with the numpad, comfortable mouse, and no interruptions.
100% on the chair, I’m waiting for work to pick back up and that’ll probably be my first good purchase cause my old piece of crap makes sitting at my computer for the minimal hours I do terrible.
But I live by my multiple monitors. When I’m sorting through receipts, doing payroll, data entry, anything, not having to alt-tab is a godsend. I grabbed 2 28" monitors, a keyboard/mouse, and a laptop dock, and it completely changed my workflow from my 14" laptop screen that I just plug my laptop in and close the lid. I need the laptop for portability, but having my landing setup makes all of my mundane office work so much easier.
LOL, those are reserved for important people when they come in. They’re not for the people that work in the building.
Last place I worked had a ping pong table that never got used by the people that worked there, as well as an Xbox I never saw on
Wait they got monitors? I always had to salvage what I could for my own private junk pile or steal it from somebody when they left the company. And a desktop PC? Never in my life it’s always fucking laptops because they want to make sure I can work from anywhere
They said I was a power caller
Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment…
Yeah… it’s just we’re putting cover letters on all TPS reports now.
Did you get that memo?
Perfect!
also, every single job listing says this, and i’m NOT willing nor able to work in such an environment
god i love capitalism
I’d love a cubical, at work we only had open spaces the last 15 years or so. It’s so loud and distracting, I hate it. But the upper management always has their own individual office where they can just close the door.
The one up side to the open floor plan at work is it makes throwing nerf darts at co workers across the office easier.
Nothing is better when you’re frustrated than beaming a dart at your buddy, or starting a dart war.
Is this sarcasm?
… No? Have you never worked in a fun work environment? Nerf fights in offices are not that uncommon.
I can’t find any (good) videos of it, but I do have a video of a drunk co worker trying to play golf with fake poop.
The problem is that’s not actually fun.
Nah, it’s actually pretty fun. Try having fun some time.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I worked in that office when I was three, it was called kindergarden.
I’m sorry to hear about your poor working environment. Can I offer you a dart in these trying times?
That sounds like the exact opposite of fun to me. People shooting shit at me. Can we play D&D or something instead? I mean I don’t particularly want to hang out at work to do something “fun,” but if I have to…
If you don’t want to be involved then people won’t throw darts at you. It’s only people that want to be involved (sans the odd failed throw). Everyone in our office at least enjoys them.
There’s only one person who doesn’t like them, but she has her own office and is a massive hypocrite so she can fuck off.
Until a dart hits me by mistake when I’m trying to focus on something. Not to mention the distractions.
You get used to it. I’ve gotten to that point that a dart to the back of the head, or hitting my monitor doesn’t even make me flinch, and I don’t lose my train of though. I’ll wrap up what I was working on, then fire back.
That would make me explode. We had guys flying those mini quadcopters at the office, oh my god it was so annoying.
Hence the nerf.
I shot one with a slingshot and a nerf ball before it could get into the copy room…highlight of my career.
When you’re not involved it sucks, but when you are it’s amazing. I’ve gotten really good at ignoring them, but it took years.
Now a quad copter in the office sounds awful. How tall are your ceilings?
Jast average hight, but they had those mini quad copters like this:
When you’re not involved it sucks, but when you are it’s amazing.
Yes, and the people who don’t want to be involved have to just sit there and try to work through that chaos. It’s rude behavior.
Answering the phone:
“Yes, this is Glenn from very important global company, how may I help you? Okay, thank you for calling. I will need to check that with our local team in Barcelona. Oh, you know Anthony? Terrific guy. I’ll get right back to you on that. If you have any more specific enquiries for our Barcelona team, you can contact them by logging into the web portal. Remember to check your email for the verification of your user registration which you will need to logon to our excellent online support service. Can I help you with anything else today, sir? Have a pleasant day.”
Turning to manager.
“We need to fire Anthony. Yes some dude called Anthony in Barcelona is causing customer contact. How am I supposed to make the daily EBITDA reports on time when my phone is ringing constantly?!”
TWO MONITORS!
why get a reasonably sized monitor when you can get these babies for $20 each in bulk orders
Heh
It’s freaking me out that it looks so damn similar to where I used to work. The only thing this lacks is shelving cabinets above the desk.
Like Mr. Anderson’s cubicle in The Matrix?
Is that a page-feed scanner? Anyone that hands me a sheet of paper had better realize it’s going to sit on my desk until the end of the day, and then get dumped in the recycling.
When I worked on the accounting system at my last job they had scanners just to scan invoices. They were scary fast.
I got myself a Brother scanner to digitise my paperwork. Double-sided color scans converted to PDF in just over one second per sheet. Impressive!
I swear that I have worked in a place like this, all the way down to the stupid exposed ducts. This must be the corporate prison that our overlords have decided on.
I WFH now (thank you covid), but my jobs have been in similarly drab cubes and offices.
The work is dynamic and fast-paced. Having crazy lights and crap on the walls would not improve the work.
